There has been a lot of speculation lately about the digitalization and the state of jobs in accounting and financial administration, and whether those jobs will remain in humans’ possession or is there going to be a massive wave of technology, that will replace humans and their speciality for example in billing and and accounting. This topic concerns me because financial administration is that type of area, that I have been picturing myself working in and now that there is discussion of the future in these jobs, my interest is bigger than ever.

There are two perspectives in this matter. The first one claims that the so called easy and routine jobs will be mechanized as the technology develops. For example making small and routine entries in a company´s accounting will be made by computers without humans controlling them. So therefore there is discussion about the entire profession vanishing soon. On the other hand, the second perspective is assured that this kind of a scenario will turn into an asset of the before mentioned profession. They are saying that the existing financial administration employees will slowly become professionals in analyzing and therefore predicting a company´s future in financial matters. And that been said, they are not vanishing, they are becoming even more important to the companies they are working for. This of course means more responsibilities in new areas and the whole job description will change, but someone could also say that it will make playing with numbers more interesting.

As there will be more analyzing and anticipation of financial situation, and less routine like records, there may be a need for improving the education and training . The current education system has to take note the possible change in the industry and maybe modify the courses and focuses in the program that will in the future lead in these kinds of jobs.

One possible threat to this profession is moving the labor to the cheaper countries like China. Only East China, that is the most popular area to move labor to, has as many as 339 million employees, and companies from all over the world have been moving parts of their processes to the ”cheaper” countries. But in my opinion there would be too much trouble for training for example whole accounting department caused by moving it to another country, and therefore the companies rather keep them in the vicinity so they can communicate better with each other. (Jeffrey & Tao, 2015.)

There is also one thing that enforces the aspect that financial administration profession will remain, and that is a fact of current workers becoming more of a information based workers. This means that their work contains searching, analyzing and producing information and its different aspects. That is something that computers are incapable of doing and therefore humans are always needed to deliver the best result of doing a job. (Leppiniemi & Leppiniemi & Kaisanlahti, 1995.)

And last but not least the juridical point of view to the matter. The sound accounting principles have to be obeyed always in making every single entry in bookkeeping and that is the law. If the machines made all the entries, I think there would be questions about each company´s softwares and their capabilities to manage and obey the sound accounting principles. (Talentum Fokus, 2015.)